Notes from…Harare, Zimbabwe (artcritical.com Feb 2010)

In November last year I was invited to visit Zimbabwe. Being neither a geographic adventurer by nature nor an African art specialist, the major drawcard, besides giving lectures and workshops at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, was to discover what contemporary art means in a country usually seen through the prism of political and economic crisis. I was looking to be surprised and challenged and was not disappointed.At my very first meeting with a Zimbabwean colleague, Heeten Bhagat, a curator at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, I was asked: “How do you feel about the distinction between art and craft?” I attempted to dismiss the question as not being pertinent in the context of contemporary art practice but was promptly advised: “Oh, you better be prepared to answer that, because it is a big issue in Zimbabwe.”My experiences over the following weeks confirmed that and other “anomalies” to the occidental view of art. They also forced me to temper my critical agendas by absorbing and addressing the economical and historical realities of artists living in Zimbabwe.While we can relate to the fact that the visual arts being perceived as elitist, the origins and operations of this elitism are very different. In Zimbabwe, art’s reputation suffers from having been originally sponsored and consumed primarily by whites compared with popular artforms like music and the performing arts. Ironically, however, this perceived elitism actually allows the visual arts to fly under the radar of government censorship, giving visual artists in Zimbabwe a freer hand in terms of political critique than many of their thespian and musical counterparts. What the censors “give” in freedom of expression, however, poverty takes away. Read on at:http://www.artcritical.com/2010/02/06/notes-from%E2%80%A6harare-zimbabwe/